Data School FOCUS

Andreas Duenser

Comparison of Adzuna and IVI Job Ads Data


I’m Senior Research Scientist with Data61 in Hobart with a background in psychology / Human-Factors. I’m interested in the convergence of human behaviour & cognition, and emerging interactive technology. Combining these areas enables innovative Human-Machine Interaction (HMI) research. My research focuses on:

Chloe Plet

NSW Groundwater hydrogeochemistry


With a background on biominerals, palaeoenvironemental reconstruction and organic geochemistry, I am now a postdoctoral researcher at CSIRO. Although I learned some matlab during my undergrad, I had never really understood it or used it. I was mostly using excel, which often made me very frustrated. I really enjoyed the data school FOCUS particularly learning to “speak to computers” and basic coding skills. Learning R basics has definitely changed my perspective on how to record data and given me a new view on time management when receiving large and complex excel datasheets.

Dong Chen

Overheat risks in Australia's new housing stock


I am a researcher with years of programming experiences in FORTRAN, a computational programming language. Programming, computate simulations, research and communicating with various stakeholders and research partners in residential building energy efficiency are my daily activities.

Douglas Bearham, Daniel Gorman and Mat Vanderklift

Gamma irradiation does not affect the stable isotope signals of fish, crustaceans, submerged vegetation or soils.


I work for CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric research in the benthic ecology team. I’m a former pearl diver and researcher with Paspaley Pearls in Broome WA. My main research interests to use stable isotopes in food web analysis. I’ve never needed much coding before Data School other than loading other peoples scripts and running them to generate figures. I have been off work for the last two years recovering from a heart attack. I’m glad to be alive and back at work!

Felix Weihs

Development and application of Bioluminescence Resonance Energy Transfer-based sensors


In my postdoctoral fellowship, I am constructing sensors made of proteins that are based on a biophysical phenomenon called Bioluminescence Resonance Energy Transfer (BRET). A light-generating luciferase coupled to an energy acceptor such as a fluorescent protein emit light with different wavelength maxima. The available options are endless, but based on certain properties, I am designing and constructing new and superior BRET system which in turn are applied as biosensors in human blood.

Franziska Althaus

Benthic habitats and VME fauna on the Tasmanian Seamounts


I work in CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere on deep-sea observational data from the outer continental shelf and the continental slope.

Gilbert Permalloo

Investigating the use of portable X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy for rapid quantification of Phosphorus in wheat straw and grains


My name is Gilbert Permalloo. I am a Research Project Officer and I am presently working on roots architecture and rhizosphere of wheat. I worked in sugarcane agronomy for about 24 years and I was doing a little bit of basic programming in Fortran 77 and GWBasic about 30 years ago. Most of my data manipulation and visualisation are done in Excel. I could not write any code in R before I joined Data School and I was spending lots of time working with data in spreadsheets. On the otherhand, I am amazed to witness every day the marvel that R can do with data manipulation and visualisation.

Jasjeet Kaur

Carbon fibre precursor development


I am a Research Scientist in Carbon Fibre Precursor development. I did not know how to code prior to Data School Focus but was always curious to learn. My daily routine included designing and performing experiments followed by processing data and its analysis using Origin and Microsoft Excel. I work on a pilot scale wet spinning line which turns novel polymers into fibres and involves many predictor variables for optimisation. Large amount of data is generated from testing the fibres which makes analysis a tedious and time consuming task and a lag in feeding complete learnings of one experiment to the next.

Jennifer Giles

Comparison of Microbial Populations within Human Faecal Collection Methods


Before Data School I was focused within the Molecular/Micro Laboratory space where our team is involved in looking at the effects of different diets on the gut microbiome. Spending the majority of my time developing and optimising molecular assays I have no prior background in either R or coding.

Lauren Williamson

Automated Control for the Coke Reactivity Test


I am a Senior Research Scientist in the Coke Making Team at QCAT in QLD. My team operates two pilot scale coke ovens and characterises the coke that we produce to support metallurgical coal producers with their marketing efforts. My team deals with quite a large amount of data in excel to facilitate the reporting of process data and coke test results to our clients. Prior to data school I had no experience in coding in R.

Mandy Yialeloglou

Benefits to hazard reporting


Introduce yourself. I joined CSIRO in 1989 as a laboartory technician. I have been fortunate to have had many oportunities in both technical and support roles in my 30 years. I moved into the HSE team in 2005 and in my current role as “HSE Specialist - Systems and Analytics” in 2018. I manage our HSE reporting systems and forms, I have a really great working relationship with my IM&T colleagues. I am perfecty happy in the system administration space but I had very few current anaytical skills. I rely heavily on IM&T support for my ‘data wrangling’ and wanted to upskill With the incresing demand from the Board, ET and Busines Units for both regular and ad hoc HSE data anaylsis I am workig to create a process to accommodate these and be able to answer the ‘what if’, ‘why’? questions.

Marina Alexander

Mining the transcriptome for biomarkers of infection


I’m Marina and I work on viruses. Before data school I would typically enter my data into Excel or Prism to make bar graphs with errors bars, then communicate these in publications and powerpoint slides. Using R, I can now reproducibly wrangle data imported from Excel, plot with ggplot2 to make really flexible and informative visualizations of the raw data. This has helped me to understand the sources of variation in my data, apply appropriate statistics and make novel visualizations.

Melania Figueroa

Hunting for fungal rust effectors


My name is Melania Figueroa and I am currently Leader of the Next Generation Crop Protection Group, Ag & Food Traits Program. I am very interested in understanding the evolution of rust fungi and delivering genetic disease resistance to cereals. I did not have any previous experience using R language before Data School.

Natalia Malinowski

Presence and abundance of 'Brain Eating Amoebae' in West Australian drinking water storage tanks


My name is Natalia Malinowski and I am a PhD student at CSIRO in conjunction with the University of Western Australia. Prior to starting my PhD journey, I had achieved a Bachlor of Biomedical Science and a Master of Infectious Disease. I coach Synchronised Swimming and do Polish Folkloric Dance in my spare time on top of holding down a couple of part time jobs. Data School has taught me so many skills that I have been able to carry across to my PhD work. I am now able to code, and finally understand some statistics!

Omar Mendoza Porras

Catering for prawns, in pursuit of sustainability in the aquaculture industry


I am an oceanographer with experience in biotechnology, mass spectrometry and aquaculture. Before Data School I did not code at all and my data crunching consisted of lots of clicking and data sorting in Excel. It was not enjoyable.

Yuzi Wang

Modelling the degradability of wheat starch


Hi, I’m Yuzi, a phD student in the cereal quality group of Agriculture & food. Without any programming experience before, the data school is sort of a whole new world for me, and it turned out to be very intereting and I’m keen to learn more.